A thinking woman sleeps with monsters
by hanakazari
Summary: Later, they will realise it was a sign. Twenty facts about Dove. Post-Trickster's Queen, spoilers.


_A thinking woman sleeps with monsters__  
_Twenty facts about Dove

**1. **

Dove was born under the sign of Antares; the Royal Star, the Scorpion's heart, the Watcher in the West.

It was a very lucky birth, the astrologers said, but thought nothing more of it.

Later, they will realise it was a sign.

**2. **

Of all her dead, her mother is her only happy ghost. It's a cliché but even now all Dove can remember of her time with her is sunlight and laughter and bells.

And yet, every time she remembers her, she can only think, _I will never be as happy again_.

**3. **

After the coronation, Aly assigns Taybur to her, her own personal guard.

She's not stupid enough to think that Kypiroth will protect her (he couldn't even keep track of her sister) or that she can stop herself dying by sheer _will_ but after all these deaths and departures, at the least she wants a constant, someone she knows.

'There's Bayu or Palani or even Ekit,' she argues. 'I don't need him.'

'He's the best I have,' says Aly. '-and maybe he needs _you_.'

_Oh,_ she realises, and she looks at him, really looks at him, standing a bit apart from them in his black mail, head bowed. She isn't the only one who's lost loved ones in this war.

**4. **

Later, she wonders how she could have ever said she didn't need him. Taybur protects her like a brother, helps her with what he can, accepts her in all her moods. Dove is grateful, then guilty, then angry, before she realises that it isn't so much repentance as a way of life.

_In spite of everything, Dunevon was lucky_, she thinks. In this way, she knows she is, too.

**5. **

She receives letters from Sarai, now and again. She writes about her son, about her husband, about her horses. But mostly she writes about Carthak: _exotic and exciting and changing_, in spite of Dove's coronation, or maybe because of it. It feels like a challenge. Or a justification. Dove isn't sure which.

**6.**

Even so, she misses her sister most of all.

**7.**

She never names the chestnut stallion.

'You should,' says Winna, uneasily. 'Out of respect.'

Dove shrugs, strokes his mane. 'The people will name him,' she says. 'He belongs to them, if anyone.'

(Yet even as she says this, she thinks, _I could have flown to the Roof of the World on his back. No, beyond-_)

**8.**

She doesn't like the palace. Oh, it is beautiful, she knows it is; all marble walls, white terraces, pavilions adorned in gold. Proud alabaster profiles of the old raka; oil paintings by masters from foreign lands. Air heavy with the scent of sandalwood and incense.

It's beautiful but there's something old and decadent about its beauty that reminds her too much of its late luarin masters and makes her uncomfortable. When she sits on the throne she doesn't feel like the herald of the revolution. She feels like a successor.

**9.**

Dove's tendency to smash things doesn't lessen as she grows older. If anything, it increases. But after a while Aly grows tired of seeing countless masterpieces disappear. She is careful not to say anything like _you need to grow _up but she does lock away the most valuable of the china and introduces her to an elderly potter in Rajmuat.

Once her anger has dissolved she admits that there _is_ something soothing to the cool, smooth clay, to the endless turn of the wheel. But she still thinks that there is nothing more satisfying than the sound of smashing glass.

**10.**

Most people have only one organ to store grief. Dove can store grief everywhere; the kidney, the liver, the lungs, the skin. _A human adaptation_, says Taybur with a black smile, but it's true. And yet even she can't hold it back infinitely. Think about it too long and it will all flow back to her heart, until it bursts and spreads through her veins like poison.

It will kill her one day. She is sure of that.

**11.**

She does not like Kypiroth at all. Kypiroth, in turn, rarely shows himself to her. He tolerated her; she was his precious queen (king?); the only one who could fulfil his prophecy and secure his territory. But he liked Sarai better, for all that she deserted him in the end.

'No hard feelings,' he says, 'but you are a little too grave for my liking.'

'And why would that be,' she says. It's not a question.

'_Still_ bitter about that?'

She looks hard at him; he laughs. He can't care, not now that he has what he wanted, and she will never forgive him for that.

**12.**

She meets Aly's family (just) once. She watches them carefully and sees bits and pieces of Aly reveal themselves in all of them. It's a bit like finding the first sketches for a building you've lived in for a long time. Her mother, brash and impatient; her father, clever and charming. Thom the academic, observing his surroundings with sharp eyes.

But her twin was not like her at all. Alan was quiet, content to listen to Aly tease, scold, fuss, happy to watch her, the centre of attention. He had the air of someone long used to being overshadowed by his sister. She thought, with sympathy, _I can understand that._

**13.**

She is not beautiful as her sister. Courtiers who sang their praises to her dangerous, enthralling sister and called her _sunrose_ could only describe Dove as elegant and graceful in her own right. It shouldn't trouble Dove but it does.

'Is that the reason I will never be as good a leader as Sarai?' she asks Fesgao.

'Who told you that?' he snaps.

Dove shrugs.

'How short human memory is,' he spits, viciously. He sees her expression, then says, more gently, 'You saved us. There is no one we could love more.'

**14.**

No matter how valuable his work, no matter how important Aly claims he is to her, she's not entirely comfortable with Nawat. There's a strange awkward grace in him, into the bony arms and too-long legs; a spirit that does not quite fit the shape of its body. She looks at him and she sees a bird trapped on the ground. She keeps waiting for him to fly.

**15.**

Dove likes evening the best; the scent of night-blooming jasmine, the sharp silhouettes of the midday sun blurring into softer shadows at dusk, the water of the viewing-lakes becoming mirror-still. And later: quiet falling over the palace as it slows down; servants returning to their quarters, lamps extinguishing, nobles settling down to sleep. It puts her at rest, somehow, the thought that _all is well in the Isles_, at least for another day.

**16.**

Dove refuses to take up swordfighting, but she does become a very proficient archer over time.

'It's not enough, though,' says Aly, '-what are you going to do if you're cornered at close quarters? Not to mention, bows and arrows are a little hard to conceal.'

'Your father was the Rogue. You could teach me now to fight with knives,' Dove suggests.

Aly thinks for a minute. 'It's not very. . . queenly, your Majesty.'

'But it _will_ keep me alive,' Dove argues.

So over the next half-year Aly teaches Dove how to fight with a knife. She shows Dove how to wield combat knives, throwing knives, butterfly knives. When it comes to a fight; Aly is utterly ruthless- some of the techniques she teaches Dove are gruesome. She knows she asked for it. But still. They make her feel sick to the stomach.

_I could never kill like this,_ she tells Aly.

Aly smiles. She's heard it all before. _Oh, but you will,_ she says.

The sad thing is that she's right.

**17.**

Dove's favourite fruit is _lengkeng_; dragon's eye, they call it, in the Eastern lands. It was her mother's, too; every night, after dinner, they would peel a small mountain of the fruit, then sit back to savour the tangy, translucent flesh.

To this day, Chenaol makes sure there is a plate of freshly-peeled _lengkeng_ at the breakfast table. It's not the same; Chenaol knows that, but Dove is grateful, all the same.

**18.**

She rarely plays chess anymore. It disappoints a lot of people- _You used to love it_, protests Baron Engan. But she is sick to the death of politics and metaphors for politics. She doesn't want to lose anyone. Not even in games.

**19.**

Dove really did like Zaimid. She probably would have loved him, in time.

But like everyone else, he was Sarai's from the start.

**20.**

The day that Petranne leaves, she wants to cry, so much. She doesn't, of course. Even as it breaks apart in her hands, she holds her heart together, preserving its shape, in the hope that one day it might be whole again. The same way she is holding her country together.


End file.
